Zones, Sectors and the Design Process

A design is a set of decisions put in the right order. Get the order wrong and every later decision gets more expensive, because a path laid before the water is a path the water will move, and a shed built before the access road is a shed you carry material to by hand. The most common failure in a first design is not a wrong element. It is a right element in the wrong sequence.

The process, in order

Observe for a full year before you build anything expensive. Walk the ground in rain, in frost, in the driest week of summer. Mark where water gathers and leaves, and where the sun strikes at both solstices.

Survey and record. Boundary, slope and aspect, existing trees and water, soil pits, and the compass bearings of the sun and wind. Written down, with dates.

Set the frame and the budget. What the farm is for, what the household eats, how many hours a week the work can have, and what money is available. A design that ignores the labour budget is a wish.

Then zones, sectors, access, water, plants, animals, structures. Structures come last on purpose, because they are the most expensive thing to move.

Zones are a question about visits

The zone diagram most courses hand out is a set of rings with the house in the middle. Used as a drawing exercise it teaches nothing. Used as a question it is useful: how often do you go there, and what is that visit worth in labour?

Zone 0 is the house. Zone 1 is the ground you visit every day, sometimes twice: the kitchen garden, the propagation bench, the herb bed, the compost, the tools. It sits close to the door, since a garden forty metres away is watered and weeded less than one ten metres away. Zone 2 is visited a few times a week: the orchard, the staple block, the poultry. Zone 3 is the field scale ground, grain and grazing, worked in blocks. Zone 4 is the managed wild, the woodlot and coppice. Zone 5 is the ground you leave alone and watch.

Sectors are energy arriving from outside

A sector is something that arrives at the site whether you invite it or not: sun, wind, fire, water flow, frost, wildlife, noise, view, and the neighbours' line of sight. It is drawn as an arrow from the direction it comes from, across the site, with the width of the thing it carries. Sun and wind decide most small sites.

Varro's rule for siting a steading is the same sector analysis in prose: face it east, "to secure shade in summer and sun in winter," and keep it off the river bank and out of the hollow, where damp air sits.

Doing the classic diagram properly

Draw the site to scale first, with the real boundary and the real house. Then lay the zones over it as bands shaped by visit frequency and by the access and obstacles on the ground. Then draw the sector arrows over the top, from measured compass bearings, wide enough to cover the whole arc the sun, the wind or the frost actually occupies. Where the summer sun sector crosses zone 1, that is where shade goes. Where the storm wind sector crosses zone 2, that is where the windbreak goes. Where the water flow crosses the access route, that is where the swale or culvert goes, on contour.

A worked small site

Take half an acre on a south-facing slope, house and access road at the top corner, no water on site. Zone 1 sits beside the back door: a few kitchen beds, a seed bench, compost bays. Zone 2 runs downslope: the food forest on the warmest face, the poultry, and the staple block on the flattest ground. Zone 3 is the rest of the arable ground, in contour strips, rainfed. Zone 4 is the hedge and woodlot at the ridge, planted for fuel and windbreak. Zone 5 is the wet bottom corner, left alone. Water first: a tank at the roof, gravity down to the garden, swales on the contour below the food forest. Access follows the contour.